This done, Osborn was ready to take two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills from me and vanish without a word. Then I turned to Tall Jim. In the quickest possible time I had him in overalls and a linen duster which I had brought along, and was half carrying him to the waiting carriage. He couldn’t have walked there unassisted, it requiring all my strength to support him, he was so nearly prostrated by his journey in the barrel. He had been in it for nearly an hour, I afterward learned. I am satisfied that we would have had a dead man in the barrel had it been delivered one minute later. In packing him, he had been so wedged in that breathing was nearly impossible. He was in the most intense pain during his transit from the prison yard to the storehouse. I wondered that he lived. But there was no time for delay--five minutes after his release we were humming away from the scene as fast as fleet-footed horses would carry us, and no stop was made till we had put two miles between us and the prison. Then we halted long enough to give Jim a stimulant and clothe him in a suit I had provided to take the place of the convict garb, which we threw in a clump of bushes. Off we went again, in the direction of Delaware, where we intended to board a train for New York. At times I was worried more than I cared to confess over Jim’s condition. It would not have surprised me had he died on our hands. When we had traversed eight miles, he began to show signs of improvement, and when presently he began to evince some interest in his surroundings, I felt more hopeful; and finally, when he asked where we were bound, I knew that he was all right. “We’re hustling for Delaware,” I explained to him, “as fast as hoofs will take us there.” “Now, George, you’re making a bull of it,” he whimpered, like a petulant sick child; “that’s not right.” I insisted that we were doing just what we ought to do, but he persisted in telling me a plan he’d mapped out in his cell, which would take us some forty miles back in the country, and in the very worst direction we could possibly go. Not unlike most men in prison, he was tiptop in building air-castles. He kept arguing until he was about ready to shed tears of disappointment. But I wouldn’t give in an inch. At last I could stand his whining no longer and determined to show my authority. It required just thirty seconds to squelch him and his pet scheme. He never again talked about it. “See here, Jim,” I said, in a voice that he knew had a business ring in it; “I didn’t come away out here in Ohio to make a blind ‘get-away,’ so there’s two things for you to do--lay aside your advice, or--” and I produced a secret service shield, a United States warrant for John Doe or Richard Roe, and a glistening pair of handcuffs. Amazed at the completeness of my scheme to make certain his escape, Jim “took a tumble to himself,” as the language of the crook has it, and subsided.